Dem Pollster: Hispanics May Stay Home for Midterms Because Obama Delayed Exec Amnesty

A top Democratic pollster thinks Hispanic voters may sit out the 2014 midterm elections because President Barack Obama did not enact his executive amnesty by the end of the summer.

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Pollster Celinda Lake told The Hill that Democrats face “a big uphill battle for the Latino turnout, and that’s going to affect our candidates” in places like Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Georgia.

In fact, she said Senate Democrats were wrong to urge Obama to delay his executive amnesty until after the midterm elections.

“It was a real disappointment to the Latino voters–rightly so,” Lake said. “I think if we’d done something, it would have energized the Latino vote and drawn a clear distinction with the Republicans.” Lake said Obama was “deferential to a number of candidates who were lobbying him not to do it,” and she felt “those candidates were absolutely mistaken in their assessment.”

Public polling, though, has hammered Obama on the issue. Obama has had record-low approval ratings on illegal immigration and it is the issue in which he gets the highest disapproval ratings in various national polls, like the most recent Economist/YouGov poll.

The numbers are so bad that Obama was silent on amnesty when he addressed the Congressional Black Caucus Dinner. As Breitbart News has reported, “a recent New York Times/CBS poll found that a plurality of Americans (39%) would be less likely to support a candidate who supports a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.”